Phalcon, a high performance PHP MVC framework

Phalcon comes as a C binary, which you can set up as a PHP module in your php.ini. It makes the framework functionality available as PHP classes, so you won’t actually have to worry about the C part after the initial installation.

I’ve been writing PHP as one the first languages I learned, because I wanted to build web things, after learning the basics of programming in Python. Now, lately I’ve been writing a lot of JavaScript, both for Frontend and Backend, so obviously with node.js.

It’s great to see this approach coming to the PHP world and it seems like a possibility to make PHP one of the first choices for building APIs. The wide spread of the language could lead to adoption, if the some hosting companies jump this wagon.

The downside compared to other frameworks is of course, that you need to have control over your hosting environment to install the binary component.

The Volt Templating Engine

The Volt Templating Engine seems very familiar and includes functionality like blocks, variables in double curly brackets, conditionals and filters for string transformation.